Young children are trained to stop, watch and listen before crossing the street. At the age of the electric car, parents may want to focus on the word “listen”.
Pedestrians are twice as likely to be affected by an electric or hybrid car as by a vehicle that works on petrol or diesel, according to a study published Tuesday by London researchers.
Although accident statistics are not yet robust enough to achieve scientific conclusions on the reasons, the researchers have hypothesized that the relatively calm operations of an electric vehicle are the key factor. Pedestrians in noisy urban areas were almost three times more likely to be affected by an electric or hybrid car.
The principal researcher Phil J. Edwards at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine told Times the study is not intended to be anti-EV. “Electric cars are definitely one thing for the future. They are a wonderful way to reduce air pollution,” he said. “But we have to alleviate the danger” for pedestrians. Electric vehicle drivers “must be very cautious about pedestrians”.
Research on the effect of electric vehicles on public security is rare – not only for cars and truckbut electric bikesScooters and other forms of electric transport. But as the EV market grows, the subject attracts more attention.
The latest notable study was published in 2009 by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, with results similar to Edwards'. The security problem, the NHTSA study said, was particularly widespread at low speed.
The growing epidemic of pedestrian distraction was outside the skills of the researchers, but Edwards said that it was probably a contributing factor: “I'm sure there would be an effect, because people are too busy looking at their iPhones while they enter the road.”
After the NHTSA study, the congress adopted a law in 2010 to demand that electric cars traveling below 19 MPH emit a sound strong enough to warn pedestrians, but it took 13 years for the NHTSA, which tends to Take his time to solve public security problemsTo put the law in force. Similar laws in Europe were implemented in 2019.
The British study, published in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health, examined accident statistics through England, Scotland and Wales from 2013 to 2017. Edwards said that it intended to conduct another study with data from 2019 to test the effect of pedestrian alert technology.
He recognized that because a hybrid car has both an electric motor and a petrol engine, some of the hybrid accidents have probably occurred with the combustion engine. But he pointed out that at low speed, hybrid cars tend to go from the fossil fuel engine to the electric driving unit.
The study examined all accidents involving pedestrians, regardless of severity. Security defenders fear that the Additional weight of the battery of an electric car can cause more serious pedestrian injuries. They also note that death deaths caused by the vehicle are proliferating as Heavy views Replace the sedans and that the caps on many vans high shoulder On a six -feet human – and well above a child's head.
